


five fifteen

by sevener



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, M/M, One Shot, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:07:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26294629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevener/pseuds/sevener
Summary: It was so late now it was early, and so cold it was a wonder the soupy air hadn’t frozen solid.
Relationships: Past OMC/OMC
Kudos: 5





	five fifteen

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying at this new thing called "not fussing over something for literal months and years" so here we are: a short one-shot that could easily derail into a 20k+ story, posted now in an effort to prevent exactly that. No beta - but if you are interested in helping on work like this and/or hockey-adjacent original work, please get into contact. I hope you enjoy!

000

The old LED light flickered in the dark, its ominous red glow bouncing off the smog that surrounded the lightrail station, making the air seem even thicker than it already - palpably - was. It was so late now it was early, and so cold it was a wonder the soupy air hadn’t frozen solid. 

Jo pulled his company-issue retroreflective jacket closer to his body, extracting a hand from a pocket to flick at the display on his wrist, cranking the jacket’s heating to the max and bracing against the instant burn it elicited in his armpits. The heater had been on the fritz for months now, but bac-spray was more affordable than a rewire, never mind a new one, and his skin was paying the price for it.

A shadow fell over Jo’s eyes as someone stepped in between him and the red light of the station. A big someone. Jo caught sight of another company-issue jacket in the reflection of the dark glass across the tracks. Figured. Who the fuck else would be trying to get home from Usine District this late? Or well, early now.

“Hey,” Jo said, his breath puffing out in a nauseous, red-tinged cloud from behind his half-clogged breather.

“Hey,” said the man next to him, his voice deep and smooth and familiar. “You just pick up the third shift?”

Jo shifted his weight from left to right, hoping the change in pressure might inspire his blood to circulate through his toes, rather than ice through his veins. “No-”

Jo was interrupted by the arrival of a lightrail car. It drifted into the loading bay soundlessly, just as a blandly pleasant voice cut through the night, announcing the 0400 Transport East-Bayling District. Together they watched the automated door slide open with a pressurized hiss, and then close again. Admitting no one, expelling no one. The car pulled away as quickly and silently as it had come, phosphorescent green taillights fading abruptly as the smog rolled back in around it.

“No,” Jo repeated into the renewed silence. “Random spot-check from central today. Got stuck with the reports, y’know how it goes.”

“Mmm.”

The platform went quiet again. Jo glanced up at the rusted, tag-encrusted beams holding the dingy polycarbonate ceiling, high up above them, squinted at it so he wouldn’t turn and search the face of the man standing next to him. Jo had never seen the moon, but there was a half-glitched display of it shivering in between the rafters. According to the screen, the moon was two-thirds full tonight. Waxing. Jo’s great-aunt had described the moon that way, once. 

He took a deep, metallic breath through his useless breather.

“Hey, would you want-”

“This is me.”

A double-car pulled into the bay, 0415 CROWCHLD DSTRCT scrolling in orange block across the front. Jo took a step back on the platform, hands pulled into fists in his pockets, ragged nails biting the skin of his palms. The man beside him finally turned, and they faced each other.

Weaver was handsome in the way that men often were in old photographs: it took your eyes a second to really focus around it. Beautiful in a way that wasn’t pretty, wasn’t cut or polished or modded. But Jo liked the straightforwardness of it - the sloping line of his jaw, the bluntness of his nose. The mismatched shapes of his eyes - one almond, and one round, both lit with a permanent charm that drew you in even against your better judgment.

Or at least, drew Jo in against his better judgement.

“Take care,” Jo choked out, glad that Weaver couldn’t see him biting his lip behind the neoprene of his breather. 

Weaver smiled. He had the hood of his heated jacket pulled up, a pinegreen breather obscuring his face from the bridge of his nose to the bottom of his chin, but Jo could tell, just by the way the corners of his lopsided eyes ticked up. Weaver was smiling.

“Good morning, Josef. I’ll see you around.”

The lightrail doors swooshed shut between them, and through the unclean plexi Jo watched Weaver take a seat in the empty car. It’s only passenger. The car lurched toward the north-facing track, and Jo watched the snake-eyes of its safety green tail lights until they winked out of sight.

000.1

The biolock refused his retinal scan three times before Jo finally growled and stuck his thumb into the scanning port, cringing at the thought of how (not) often the thing got sanitized. It did the trick though, and the steel door finally inched sideways with a pained groan, producing a gap just big enough for Jo to slip through, backpack clutched to the front of his chest. Trust the shittiest buildings in O-E District to be the hardest to get in to. As if there was anything left in the complex worth guarding. Old doors were like that though - remnants from a time when the motivation was to keep people out.

Jo shouldered open a door marked 111 V, the numeral burnt into the polycarb on the tail-end of its original metal plaque. He was careful to catch the door before it hit the first concrete step behind it, carved too close to the entrance for the door to swing open completely. The bottom of the door was notched with the evidence of everyone who’d made the mistake of letting it bang open before him, and who’d no doubt gotten a stern lecture from Mx. Yi as a result. Having already suffered that fate too many times to count, and in no mood to hear it again from them at 0500 in the morning, Jo made sure to gently latch the thing behind him before taking the stairs two at a time, all the way up to the sixth floor.

It was enough to get him sweating under his jacket, and he quickly spun the heat down by half. He’d used it enough today that the batteries would need a re-charge before his next shift, unless he wanted to freeze to death before he could clock in. The residual heat from the climb had his blood up enough that he could feel every fingertip - hopefully it’d be enough to let him claim a few solid hours tonight without draining the charge. There wasn’t much that got him in a bad mood like a morning without heat.

The scant studio apartment was predictably chilled when he finally reached it. With the perpetual blue glare of neon that filtered through the smeared window, the whole effect was a bit like standing inside of an industrial freezer.

Jo didn’t bother with the overheads. It was bad enough in the not-quite light of his uncurtained window, the faint grey wash of his wall display, set to sleep but never truly, totally dark. The thick shadows swallowed the worst of the cracks in the plaster, the moulding baseboards and piles of drained lithium charges scattered about. Jo carefully ignored the twitch and stutter of a fist-sized moth that crawled across his ceiling as he pulled off his work boots. He was too tired to acknowledge its existence, right now.

His end of day - or today, early morning - routine elicited a symphony of hisses and groans from the various appliances and machines around him, his only company in the small space. The sonic shower didn’t so much hiss as spit, but Jo stood dutifully underneath it as it attempted to cleanse his outer-layers of the worst - the smog and dust and grime of Usine. He pealed back his hood and let the sonics buzz through his hair, shaking dirt and metal particulate from the once dark blonde strands. Finally, he could pull at the catch of his breather and rip it from his face, the old thing putting up a slight but noticeable reluctance to unhand him. Jo wiped at the exposed sweat on his upper lip, as he’d been itching to do all day. 

The first few mouthfuls of straight, unobstructed air past his lips never got old. Jo relished it as he filled the kettle-pod with water from the wall and set it to heat. Instant soup, unfortunately, definitely did get old, but the promise of soothing heat sliding down his throat was enough for him to manage to choke it all down.

Today’s kimchi ramen came out over-boiled and soggy, but it at least got Jo sweating again as he sagged against the unforgiving cushions of his futon.

“Hey Silexa,” Jo said to the empty room. 

A constellation of tiny pricks of soft blue light blinked to life around him, from nearly every surface available, as the AI of his apartment came fully awake.

“Hello Jo,” said the wall, in a clear, unaccented voice. “How was your day?”

Jo gulped down a bite of something that was distinctly _not_ kimchi or noodle (best not to think about it), and ignored the question.

“Show me Memories: Places: Blue Swallow.”

“Okay.” A spinning wheel appeared on the display, and then the frame resolved into the image of a looping flip, the first in the album. “Here are your Memories from Blue Swallow.”

The first flip was of Pietrangelo and Owl, arms thrown around each other in a posed embrace, both of their faces turned towards the camera. Owl’s platinum hair reflected in a play of light as the flip looped back and forth, Pietrangelo’s smile widening and thinning. After ten or so loops the flip slid off the screen, and a new one resolved in its place, showing almost the exact same scene but which much more blur, like Jo had fumbled the hand-display just as he’d taken it.

Jo watched the slideshow of flips in silence, broken only by the slurping of broth. There were a lot of Pietrangelo, less of Owl and Carlisle, and even fewer of Jo himself, only two or three wavering selfies that he couldn’t even remember taking, the telltale flush that stained from his cheeks to his chin a dead giveaway as to why.

“Stop.”

The wall beeped serenely to indicate it had heard his command, and the flip on the screen cycled back and forth, over and over and over. Jo, grinning so widely his cheeks had been sore the next morning, flushed and high with one arm thrown carelessly, comfortably over the wide span of Weaver’s shoulders. Jo stared at the flip, saw his own fingers tighten and relax, tighten and relax over Weaver’s bicep. Weaver’s gentle, open smile blinked back at him, blinding white and crooked.

Who was he fooling. Jo tipped back the last lukewarm dregs of broth and re-hydrated vegetable and pushed himself roughly off the couch, throwing his dish into the KitchenAid to steam blast. Then he dutifully made himself drink three whole glasses of winter-cold water from the wall, standing at the counter in the dark of the early morning. He ducked into the alcove dubiously labelled a bathroom by the building superintendent, pissed and threw back an oral hygiene tablet, chewing aggressively through the foam and spitting into the kitchen sink. There. All ready for bed.

The worst part was getting out of his heated jacket and under the chilled covers. At least he’d amassed a decent pile of them by now. Jo killed the jacket and unzipped it, laying it open on the top of the covers like some of the lingering warmth might just sink through. Most of it was snatched up quickly by the frozen air.

The rest of his sweat-stained clothing landed in a messy heap on the floor - a problem for tomorrow’s Jo. Today’s Jo was burrowing face-first into a musty pillow and groaning at the sensation of finally - _finally_ \- being off of his feet. It’d been a gruelling 17 hour shift today, on nowhere near enough sleep, and he’d be up again in a couple hours to work another on even less. If he got to The Buzz early enough Carlisle might be persuaded into letting him charge his jacket and wrist display on the cheap.

Jo rolled over, pressing his cheek into the flat pillow as he watched the flip keep looping, Weaver’s smile brightening over and over.

“Fuck off,” he said aloud.

“Okay,” replied the wall, pleasantly. The display darkened back to a blank, fuzzy grey. “Goodnight, Jo.”

Jo ignored it. He pressed his shoulders flat to the futon, felt the uneven frame dig into his back in the same place it always did. He thought of broad shoulders, warm through synthwool: those thin, old-looking sweaters Weaver was always wearing. The way he smelled like machine grease and thick smoke and cinnamon. The way Jo knew that he tasted of it, too. 

Jo frowned and rolled onto his stomach, even though sleeping this way always gave him a crick in the neck. At least like this he didn’t have to look at anything more than a corner filled with shadow. Like this, that dark corner didn’t necessarily have to be the one he knew. Like this, he could be anywhere, looking at anything. Jo closed his eyes

He wasn’t fooling anyone.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments/kudos appreciated!


End file.
